The Headmaster’s Wager. Vincent Lam
Kai had promised Muy Fa that the next time he returned to China it would be to stay. He had almost enough gold, he told her. Chen Kai did not say whether he would bring Ba Hai to China, and his son silently hoped that the Annamese woman would stay in the Gold Mountain country. Then, just months after Chen Kai had returned to Indochina, the Japanese had occupied Guangdong province. By 1939, they were in Indochina as well. The birds screeched around them, and Percival realized with surprise that there was no mountain here, golden or otherwise. Small local fishing boats with bright-painted eyes on their prows returned his suspicious gaze.
A bored moustached Frenchman glanced at their permits and Percival’s forged laissez-passer, and waved them down the gangplank. Saigon was an awkward jumble of European facades sprawled across a mud flat. Before they were off the gangplank a cyclo driver seized their luggage. He saw that Percival and Cecilia were Chinese and offered to take them to Cholon. Bumping along in the cyclo, which swerved erratically to avoid expansive mud puddles, they left Saigon on the road to Cholon.
Cecilia said, “A wretched hole.”
Percival replied, “There are fewer Japanese here.” Whether it was the collaboration of the French administration, or had something to do with the oppressive heat, the Japanese soldiers they saw seemed slower moving, more calm, than the ravenous troops in Hong Kong.
Upon arrival, despite having seen photos, Percival was surprised at the size of Chen Kai’s house looming over him. Was this it? The red-painted sign announced, “Chen Hap Sing,” the Chen Trade Company. Surely his father must have collected enough gold to return to China if he had built a house like this? Percival knocked on the door and told the servant who he was. The servant vanished inside. Shortly after, it was Ba Hai who appeared in the doorway. In person, she looked even smaller. After Percival introduced himself and Cecilia, Ba Hai stared at them through a long silence in which it was impossible to say whether she was more shocked or angry at their arrival.
She said to Percival, “You must call me ma and treat me with the same respect as you would your mother.” Ba Hai spoke the Teochow dialect, but in a way he had never heard, with the accent of her native Annamese tongue. She turned to Cecilia. “You may be young and beautiful, but if you forget that I am the first woman of this house, I will scratch out those pretty eyes of yours.” With that, she told a houseboy to take Percival to see his father, turned, and disappeared.
The houseboy led Percival up the stairs to the building’s family quarters. The servant opened a door, and Percival peered into the high-ceilinged room. It was well proportioned, the windows tall but shuttered against the daylight. There was a smoky, sweet-scented gloom. Percival recognized the source of the smoke. Some of the old men in his Hong Kong rooming house had been devotees. Why was the houseboy showing him this room? Where was Chen Kai? Then Percival saw that against the far wall, slumped on an ornate bed, was a skeletal figure who wore only a cloth around his middle and whose ribs heaved mightily as he sucked on a pipe of opium.
THE SOUNDS OF TENNIS HAD STOPPED. Percival looked up from his lemonade to see Cecilia at his table, her opponent’s hairy arm around her waist.
“The Viet Cong are keeping your knives bloody, Doctor?” Percival could not recall the surgeon’s name. If he had remembered, he would have pretended not to.
“Nah. Disposable scalpels. Always clean—at the start of the case, anyhow. Pleiku is hot this week. Choppers bring them every morning. Kids, right? Fresh off the plane, all blown to bits, calling for momma.”
“Then you fix them?” said Percival.
“Humpty dumpty,” the doctor snorted. “The Cong bury these little jumpers. Charge pops up so high and blows the kid’s balls off. Cuts off his legs, too. See, I figure they intended it to rip out a soldier’s chest, but the yellow soldier is so much shorter, they calibrated it wrong.” He laughed and looked to Cecilia, who smiled obligingly. How did she put up with the smell of white men’s sweat, Percival wondered. It stank like river oxen.
Cecilia noticed the two glasses. She caught the eye of the waiter, gestured to bring another.
“Don’t worry about me, honey. You’ve got a business deal to discuss, right? I’ve got to go.” He bent for a peck on the cheek from Cecilia, but she found his lips with hers, made a show of the kiss. Percival drank his lemonade.
“Wow,” the surgeon winked at Percival, “a country worth fighting for.”
“Bye, love,” she called sweetly as he left. Cecilia sat and drank a whole glass of lemonade. Her chest still heaved from the effort of the game.
“A new business partner?” Percival asked in Cantonese. “Or a friend?”
“Everything is business,” she said.
“It’s like that with you, isn’t it?”
She leaned forward. “Dai Jai must leave Vietnam immediately. The mood in Saigon is sour. I heard of one officer in the Rangers who turned in his brother to the quiet police.”
“A suspected communist?”
“Supposedly. Or a family feud. But there’s no time to waste, Dai Jai is in danger.”
“How did you hear of his problem so quickly?”
“His problem? Your problem. I’m sure this is your fault, always blabbering on about China. For all the times you talked about returning there, if only once you had actually gone!”
“I tell Dai Jai to marry Chinese, but I should remember to advise him that his wife must also be Chinese inside, unlike his mother.”
She laughed. “Is that supposed to be some kind of insult? Pathetic.”
“It is from his mother,” said Percival evenly, “that Dai Jai learned to speak before thinking.”
“His mother thinks about surviving and advancing in this world. As for defying some trivial new rule from Saigon, from whom else but you could Dai Jai get such a nonsensical idea?” She signalled for another lemonade. “Anyhow, when you already teach Chinese students English, why should you oppose teaching them Vietnamese?”
“It’s different. English is profitable,” said Percival. “We may not have to teach Vietnamese anyway. As you know better than anyone, the right contacts can change any Saigon policy. Mak is making inquiries.”
“Mak, always Mak. It’s good Mak has replaced your brain, as your own was always so lacking.” She switched to English. “Listen to me. I don’t give a shit about your school. Think about your son.” Then back to Cantonese. “We must send Dai Jai to Europe or America, before he is taken from us. I will arrange it.” She drained her glass. Percival watched the beautiful line of her throat undulating as she swallowed. He had loved kissing her there.
“Did you rehearse that vulgar English expression just for me? You would send him to a place full of foreigners?” he said.
“You would say he is a foreigner here.”
“Of course he is. But why should he leave, when I am well connected in Vietnam? I’ll protect him. Anyhow, if he goes anywhere, it should be to China.”
Cecilia laughed. “You are so predictable, both in what you say and what you fail to do. If you really wanted to go home to China, you would have gone by now.”
“I stayed for you.”
In 1945, after the Japanese surrender, people were moving in every direction. Cecilia had challenged Percival to do what he said he wanted, to return to China. She would not go. He was still in love with her then, hopeful that things would work out between them. He stayed. When he was eager to return in 1949, to cheer Mao’s unification of the country, Cecilia became pregnant with Dai Jai and there was no question of travel. They had waited a long time for a child, had thought themselves barren. Then came the school, and with it the money and its enjoyable uses. By the